The sun shines, the wind blows, and accordingly dear wife and I get to watch TV, read a book with bedside lamps - or we don't.
If we get too many overcast, windless days, there can be a hiccup in the routine.
The house batteries start to struggle, and the generator has to be cranked up.
That's no big deal - such is life off the grid, running with solar panels and an old wind turbine.
Many people live that way these days, for which everyone owes something to a Scotsman.
In 1887 a kilt-wearing professor, one James Blyth, built the first wind turbine.
Jimmy designed and installed a 10 metre high, cloth-sailed job in the garden of his holiday cottage at Marykirk in Kincardineshire to power the lights.
It must have been windy there - he sometimes produced a surplus, which he offered to the people of Marykirk to light the main street.
They turned him down though, because they thought electricity was 'the work of the devil'.
Maybe they just didn't like the look of his contraption, whirring away in the cottage garden.
Almost 130 years later an Australian Federal Treasurer said, "I drive to Canberra to go to Parliament, and I find those wind turbines around Lake George utterly offensive. I think they're just a blight on the landscape."
To which the MD of the company that owned them memorably responded, "I don't think it's appropriate to contemplate that the view of one motorist, 10 kilometres away from the wind farm, is relevant in any discussion of renewable energy."
They can look quite graceful, me thinks, but the need for nice clean mass-produced energy is a political hot potato, and people often get passionate about it.
Being happily off-grid means we have pretty much put our flag down in a certain camp.
All of which comes to mind with the local news that a 72-turbine wind farm is proposed, dotting the ridgelines of the big hills that march west from our place.
A bloke from the company is coming out to stand on our veranda where it looks across the valley and take some photos.
To these photos, the company man will add an artist's impression of how many of the 72 machines would be in our line of sight along those hilltops.
Maybe none? One or two? Ten or more?
I guess the fair-dinkum-ness of our 'green' credentials will be tested by what he reports back.
Will we go with the flow, or will NIMBY-ism rear its ugly head?
The devil is in the detail.
- Ross and Gemma Pride have split their time between Sydney and Billagal, Mudgee, since 2001.
